Light unto all the Nations
Source:Simpletoremember.com
It has been prophesied in the Torah that Jews would be a light unto the nations,
“I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great. You shall become a blessing. And I will bless those who bless
Now, if you obey Me and keep my covenant, then you shall be My special treasure among all the nations for all the world is Mine. And you will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation to Me… (Exodus 19:5-6)
The prophet Isaiah (42:6) states,
“I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness, and will hold your hand and keep you. And I will establish you as a covenant of the people, for a light unto the nations.”
Despite our small numbers, the Jewish People seem to occupy a disproportionate place as a focus of world attention.
As Mark Twain wrote of the Jew:
“He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning, are also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.”
How could we imagine a small group having such a profound impact on the world all around it? The two approaches which seem to have some precedent to them are:
1) Conquest (like in the case of Greece and Rome), or
2) Proselytization (as with Christianity and Islam).
The difficulty, however, is that during the past almost 2,000 years, the Jewish people have rarely had an army, and have always shied away from conversions.
Despite being the most hated people, few in number and dispersed across the globe, Jews are the most influential people the world has known. Jews are responsible for the idea of ethical monotheism and the absolute moral standard that comes from a belief in one God.
Before the Jews, the ancient world thought that infanticide was morally correct (even Aristotle wrote in favor of it.) Before the Jews came along, the world thought that “might was right.”
It was the Jewish people that gave the world the ideas of respect for life, peace, equality, justice, love of neighbor, social responsibility, and holiness of human purpose.
Approximately three billion people (almost half the world) believes in some form of monotheism, and all agree that they got it from us (i.e. from Abraham). This is the clear prerequisite to both morality and civilization in the world.
All throughout the world, many of the major concepts within Judaism have been widely accepted:
1. We are all “children of one G-d”, therefore we have a fundamental social responsibility towards others. This leads directly to “love your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:18)—a Jewish, not a Christian idea.
2. Society must be committed to truth, justice, fair trials, etc.
3. All people have free will and unlimited potential for greatness. “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Declaration of Independence). This may be why the Talmud mandated universal education about 2,000 years ago, while the rest of the world has only incorporated this into their society within the last 100 years.
4. We should seek peace, not war. Today, on the wall outside the United Nations, the hope of the world is emblazoned, using the words of the Jewish prophet Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nations shall not lift up sword against nations. Neither shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)
One might ask, “Aren’t these ideas intuitively obvious? How can we take credit for them? Didn’t other societies also have them?” The point being made is the following—we are the only society which doesn’t merely posses the ideas, but has a complete system for implementing them. Our society, in fact, was the only one until very recently which even attempted to actually put them into practice. It is very significant to note that many of these ideas were only accepted recently by the Western world—where our influence has been strongest, and are still not accepted in many areas of the rest of the world—where our influence has been more minimal.
A very fundamental question could be asked on everything which has been said within this prophecy until now: The prophecy is that the Jewish people will be a light unto the nations; all that has been shown until now, however, could be viewed as merely showing that the Torah alone has been a light unto the nations. Where do we have any indication that the Jewish people themselves, independent from Judaism, have an intrinsic ability to strongly impact the world? In other words, maybe there is nothing particularly distinctive about Jews themselves. Perhaps, it is only because the Jews have been in possession of such an extraordinary book, the Torah, that their impact upon the world has been so profound!
The difficulty with attempting to answer this question is that all throughout history, Jews have been so intrinsically connected with the Torah. It would seem that the only way to evaluate this would be to do an experiment in which we separated Jews from Judaism. We could then determine if Jews continued behaving in an extraordinary manner (although not necessarily in accordance with Torah guidelines) or simply faded into the background and acted like all other people.
This experiment has already been performed for us. Over the past 150 years, for the first time in all of Jewish history, we have Jews entirely disconnected from Judaism. What then do we find when we study the behavior of these first truly secular Jews?
The Wall Street Journal ran a 3-part series a few years ago on the three individuals that in their view had the greatest impact on the entire 20th century. Who do you think they selected? Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx. How likely is it that all three would turn out to be Jewish? Considering that the Jews have never (in recent times) exceeded 1/2 of 1% of the world population, that means that for every Jew that lived within the previous 150 years, there were over 200 non-Jews. Therefore the odds against the first of these three occupying this position of ultimate influence on the world were 200 to 1, the second joining him were 40,000 to 1, and the third being there as well, were 8,000,000 to 1.
Remarkably, Jews have received almost one-fifth of all Nobel prizes awarded since 1901. This is all the more striking when one considers that it was as recently as the middle of the 19th century that Jews were first given the ability to attend universities and enter many different professions, especially in the various sciences!
Jews continue to be exceptionally committed to education. In America, they are twice as likely to attend college as non-Jews. At Ivy League schools, about 23% of students are Jewish, even though Jews comprise just 2% of the U.S. population, according to Hillel. In numerous top colleges, Jews comprise in excess of 30% of the student population. At least 35% of Washington students and about 30% of Emory students are Jewish, even though these are in the south, with traditionally low Jewish student populations. In 2002, the Wall Street Journal reported that many colleges were actively recruiting Jews to their ranks. This encluded Vanderbilt where Jewish enrollment had gone up from 2% in the 70’s to 4% in the 2000s. Princeton in the 1980s cultivated ties with predominantly Jewish high schools by offering merit scholarships to their graduates. One third of the University of Pennsylvania’s student body is Jewish.
Jews are prominently in the forefront pushing for social change:
1) Many of the top leaders of both the Russian and Hungarian revolutions were Jewish.
2) Approximately 60% of the members of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)—the major student activist organization of the 1960’s, were Jews. The two most well-known student activists of the 1960’s, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, were both Jews. In fact, a survey by the American Council of Education in 1966-7 stated that “the best single predictor of campus protest (during the 1960’s) was the presence of a substantial number of students from Jewish backgrounds.”
3) In 1967, 40% of all Peace Corps volunteers were Jewish.
4) In careers: Jews in the USA are over represented in proportion to the general population by 231% in medicine, 233% in mathematics, 265% in law, 300% in dentistry, and 479% in psychiatry.
5) In income: Jews in the USA have the highest income of any ethnic group, 72% above the average and 40% higher than the second highest group, the Japanese.
The Gemara says that Jews are more driven for meaning than non-Jews. It is this extraordinary drive for meaning which seems to be the common denominator for all of these many differences in the behavior of even secular Jews. Whether meaning is understood in terms of science, education, desire for social change, idealism, a prestigious profession, or just money—Jews are clearly more determined and able to achieve a remarkable level of success than the general non-Jewish population around them. One thing which is abundantly clear—this phenomenon of uniqueness is just as much a function and a statement of the Jewish people themselves as it is about the Torah.
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